As we head into Thanksgiving, we embrace the power of tradition in all of its sundry digestible forms - the soft muck of sweet potatoes covered in brown sugar crumble, cranberry in the shape of a can (including those funky little horizontal lines), the beans, the noise, the bad jokes, the magical expansion of waist lines. And in our house, burnt fingers.
When I was a child, black Friday was the day we put lights on the pine tree between our house and the Donahue's. While our neighbors snuck out of their driveway to hit the mall, we dragged the Christmas lights out of the basement and started to untangle them on the living room floor, like a small well-trained unit preparing for battle. I don't know how, exactly, the strings of lights managed to become so intricately intertwined over the summer, wrapped around and through each other in a bizzare ritual of bulbs-in-a-box intimacy, but they did, and the untangling usually took until lunch time, at which point we would stretch the strings straight down the hall in a proud display of diligence and rigor, and head for the cheese steaks.
That's when, more or less, the dogs and neighborhood children came streaming in to get away from their parents, who had come home from black Friday shopping foul and scary yelling, "Don't look. Go away," and other spirited holiday mantras. The kids stomped clear across our neatly lined up strings. One or two bulbs shattered, and one paw opened up just enough to leave a thread-like trail of blood across the dining room rug. We were all told to go outside and wait there for lunch.
After lunch, we plugged the lights in and weeded out the duds. In the later years, the indoor bulbs were small like they are now, but individually charged. We could pop out a non-working bulb and replace it relatively easily, with one of the 3 replacement bulbs that came with the kit. The outdoor lights were the size of small chandelier bulbs and easily replaced by unscrewing them from the socket and reaching into the hammer drawer for the spare bulb collection. The line could not be plugged in for more than 5 minutes, however, so we had to work fast - identifying dead bulbs and unscrewing them before they got too hot to touch. The shattered bulbs were trickier, and the ones that exploded in our hands were a mess of paper thin shards and wiry filament. It was my brother Teddy who taught us all to remove those bulbs with nail tweezers, and Teddy who demonstrated for us why it's better to unplug the string before you make that metal to metal take place. Sometimes a single socket was dead. We'd weed through the garbage for a bright colored dead bulb, screw it in and call it good.
Hanging bulbs on the tree, of course, began with plugging them in. My brothers wrapped the hot bulbs around the limbs of the tree, first carefully and then hastily and finally with some degree of pain, reaching between the lights to grasp the green cord whenever possible, finally flinging the bulbs at the higher branches. My father barked orders - "not like that" - "There's a holiday over there" (by which he meant a big bald spot). A crowd gathered in the later years, when my brothers were older and the tree warranted the use of a ladder. Charlie put on gardening gloves, which seemed an impossibly clever insight.
By nightfall, our tree was the glowing focal point of the street. The Donahues cheered and vowed to help more next year. Teddy invited everyone in for a drink, my mother tilted her head in resigned alarm, and Charlie quietly nursed his battered finger tips. I ran the empty cardboard boxes back down to the basement, wondering what magic in them made lights tangle, and when I emerged, we all focused on eating again.
Things change. The Donahues moved. We moved. That tree is so big now that you'd have to hire paratroopers to rig it up. Teddy is gone, and I live too far away to go home for a holiday that doesn't exist in my country. My father doesn't bark orders anymore, and thanks be to trees and innovation, those bulbs have been replaced with cooler, safer alternatives.
And Friday morning, Charlie will be with my parents. He will go down to the basement in their small house and find the cardboard box of lights he carefully put away last year. He will take them out and plug them in. Whole strings won't work, and he'll toss them out. He's told me he's going to replace them with LED bulbs, because he likes how they look, and because he cares about how much electricity lights use. (LED strings use about 80% less juice, and that matters). He'll put all the lights on timers because it will make my parents' lives easier. No crowds will gather, and my father won't bark orders. But Charlie will wheel him outside and ask for guidance and approval, to put him in charge. And my parents will be, as is appropriate, living inside a festive home.
After all the cut paws and burned finger tips are forgotten, that's what we had, after all: a festive home. And that's what I wish for you this holiday season.
Go ahead and get festive ... and use LEDs - for the sake of your finger tips, that poor beautiful tree - and the planet.
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